Google Now suggesting pirated links? This is not good

August 12, 2014 - 4:24 PM

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Google Now provides us with more information on things that we recently or actively search on Google. But the service seems to have a serious flaw with its recommendation engine as it seems to suggest even links that contain pirated stuff. Sure, Google does return links to pirated content when a user is willingly looking for such information, but the way Google Now is doing it is wrong. Below is a story of a redditor who searched for a movie’s bluray release date and after a couple of weeks, Google Now suggested him pirated links for that movie.

QUOTED

Google now automatically shows relevant articles to things you look up. You don’t see a big law suit if I Google when a bluray is out and Google then actively provides pirate links? TL;DR: I don’t care about piracy, Google is opening itself to a lot of trouble. Also possible viruses/malware on compromised sites.

I searched for days of future past a couple of weeks ago to find the bluray release date. Yesterday it started showing me these ‘research’ topics.

However, both the links that Google Now suggested are not of pirated sites. Information Week and Dark Reading are both reputed sites and the links point to comments pages, which too are empty. So it seems Google indexed some spam comments from the sites, and because the sites are reputed it showed the user results that matched his query. But it still isn’t justified on Google’s part since they did suggested links to pirated content without user’s intention of such.

Shivam is our resident designer and web developer who also enjoys writing. He loves to meditate, drive on the freeways and hunt for snipers during his Call Of Duty playtime.
Email: shivam@theandroidsoul.com